Previews

Dreamfall: The Longest Journey

Delsyn takes a quick jaunt through Casablanca in our first in-depth look at FunCom's sequel to the classic adventure game.

Spiffy:

Beautiful art direction; great music; story-driven gameplay

Iffy:

Does a game like this really need fighting? Can it break out of the "adventure game ghetto?"

It's been five years since the release of the critically acclaimed the Longest Journey. Five years during which story-driven adventure games have -- if it's possible -- become even deader than they were in 2000. This is, after all, a world where Microsoft is so averse to anything not tried-and-true that it drops avant-garde games like Tim Schaefer's Psychonauts, and the Game Developers Conference actually has to have panels on why the game industry isn't making interactive stories.

Fortunately for those of us who believe video games can and should be more than pixilated breasts and digital explosions, developer FunCom still believes in the potential of gaming to be more sophisticated and story-driven -- and it's putting its money where its mouth is with the development of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. We recently got an opportunity to take a look at the game and find out a bit more about where this fantastic voyage is heading.

For those who haven't played The Longest Journey, the premise is that the Earth we know is actually only half the story of the universe. Our scientific Earth's true name is Stark, and its reality is mirrored in another dimension by a magical Earth called Arcadia. The game concerns a young woman named April Ryan who lives on Stark in the 23rd century. When a disaster throws the balance between the scientific and magical Earths out of whack, it's up to April to step in and restore equilibrium between the two universes.

Dreamfall begins 10 years after the end of The Longest Journey. The year is 2290 and a young woman named Zo¿ Castillo has just reached a crossroads in her life. She's a bio-engineering student who's just dropped out of college, broken up with her boyfriend, and returned to her father's home in Casablanca. While she's deciding what to do with her life, though, some odd events are occurring all over the world. A phenomenon called "The Static" is interfering with "The Wire." The Wire is the descendant of today's Internet, a global network that controls everything from highway traffic to television signals to financial transactions to the medications given out in hospitals. Anything that interferes with the Wire could have catastrophic consequences, as Zo¿ finds out while watching a news report of hundreds of deaths on an automated freeway.

While the world's scientists struggle to explain the Static, Zo¿ herself struggles to explain what appear to be hallucinations. Every video screen she sees seems to display images of a bizarre black-and-white forest and a bedraggled little girl who does nothing but stare at her while a little voice whispers in her head "Save her." She's also got issues with her dad, her best friend may be involved in some illegal electronics manufacturing, and her boyfriend, an investigative journalist, has a dead body in his apartment. And that's just the first section of the game!